I have a love-hate relationship with skill systems in RPGs. On the one hand they provide several systemic benefits and allow for more character customization than class-based games. On the other they can often feel underwhelming and don’t always work well as typically implemented. I would like to examine the downsides of skill systems, and hopefully fix such systems for my own use.
While I will touch on the underwhelming nature of skill systems, I am foremost a GM and designer rather than a player and am mostly interested in how they are used in game systems. The role of a game system is, among other things, to answer questions the GM throws at it. Almost all RPG skill systems are designed such that the character possesses a numerical skill which is used to weight the result of a dice roll towards the player’s favor, with the result being a binary success or failure. It’s easy to see where this comes from, at least in D&D. Starting in 3rd edition, skill rolls are an extension of to-hit rolls. You either hit the enemy, or you don’t. You either succeed with your skill roll, or you don’t. Some games focus on the binary result as an issue, but I think the problems they’ve identified are a symptom of the larger problem of using a universal resolution mechanic for all situations.
And to be fair, the standard binary skill system works pretty well all things considered. If the GM isn’t sure whether a character can climb a wall or not, rolling with a binary outcome will answer that question. But I find there are a lot of situations where this simple outcome doesn’t provide enough information to be useful or provides frustrating behavior. One such situation is knowledge checks. A simple numerical score doesn’t tell you what your character does and does not know. You can roll to find out, but this can lead to situations where you succeed a roll to recall deeply obscure information only to turn around and bumble basic facts. Crafting is another pain point. If you are trained in the skill of weaponsmithing, this sort of skill system will tell you whether you successfully craft a given item, but not tell you how long it takes, what materials, or allow for differences in quality of the final item. We are applying a solution designed for resolving attacks to very different questions and unsurprisingly not getting the greatest results.
I suppose my issue is that skill checks tend to be used as a “good enough” replacement for systems which would provide more information. I consider combat in most RPGs to be an example of a fully developed system. It is a system which provides more information and choice than skill rolls, despite having proto-skill rolls baked in. On the other hand, something as common in RPGs as stealth is usually regulated to a single roll determining whether the character is spotted or not, carrying disadvantages for the viability of stealthy characters and for groups of people attempting to sneak as a group. Doing this to combat would likely result in a riot.
A few games do go the extra mile and design “full” systems for things other than combat, such as the hacking system in Shadowrun or the magic system in Ars Magica. These specialized systems exist alongside typical skill systems which handle other things the game isn’t focused on, providing further evidence for my belief that skill checks are often used as a patch over more developed subsystems.
Of course this is all coming from my taste and predilections as a GM. I have a tendency to want the rules to provide a lot of information, mostly so that the game can be consistent in how it operates and players can plan ahead. Not every GM or game system works that way, nor should they. Not every game can and should have detailed systems for everything. There is something to be said for the basic binary skill system giving a GM more room to improvise what is happening, or for a game to be able to focus on a single aspect it wants to highlight but leave other options open, if less developed. Regardless I am pulled by the allure of what I’ve been mentally calling “the forever game”, a game where players are able to inhabit roles as diverse as active adventurers, savvy merchants, master craftsmen, or scheming politicians and for each of these paths to have their own overlapping spheres to work with.
While running a game where the characters all go off in different directions with different life paths would probably be a mess, having these rules allows for different types of campaigns to be easily run out of the box and allows characters playing in a focused campaign to dip meaningfully into other aspects of the game world. I have more thoughts on what I’m looking for in this “forever game” which will get their own post.
Besides creating a forever game there are other reasons to consider rejecting the universal skill system or at least elaborating further on certain skills. Giving skills their own subsystems allows characters with different skills to feel very different from one another despite being made from similar building blocks. A character based around crafting skills should, in my eyes, be very different to play than a character focused on combat. By developing the crafting skills further we give that character things to do and a solid place in the game. Another reason to consider developing systems for skills would be to help RPGs branch out into different genres where combat isn’t the focus. So many RPGs have bespoke systems for combat despite nominally being focused on something else or claiming to be universal in nature. I’m sure I’m not the first person to ask the question of what these games could be without combat, but to my knowledge this doesn’t seem to be a particularly explored space.
These additional systems have the interesting property of portability. So many games sharing the same universal skill system makes it possible to create bolt-on subsystems which use the skill checks as building blocks. These can then be carried by a GM from game system to game system as they wish.
Circling way back now, the other issue I see with skill systems is their lack of umph. One of the universal skill system’s strengths is also a great weakness: Incrementalism. Small increases in numerical values simply don’t have the same narrative power or draw as gaining a new class ability or feat. Incremental quantitative changes do have a certain appeal, computer RPGs are living proof of that, but qualitative changes are much more engaging besides playing better to the strengths of the medium. I believe a big enough quantitative increase is a qualitative increase, but in general I think character advancement through feats is more fun than skill increases. Feats do a better job of describing who a character is than a +1 to haberdashery. Of course, the issue with feats is that they don’t represent incremental progress very well, which is something nice to have in an RPG system especially as players have been conditioned to expect continuous character improvement. Incremental progress (especially with diminishing returns) strikes a happy medium in my eyes where player characters can progress and character building is rewarded but it doesn’t overtake the campaign itself.
My own untested and theorycrafted solution to this is somewhat inspired by Alexis Smolenk’s sage system. Increases in skills unlock feats at regular intervals, let’s say every three skill levels. Skill levels are used primarily as a counter towards these feat intervals but the intermediate numbers can also be used for skill checks, as inputs to other systems, or for feats depending on the skill. In the style of Alexis’ sage system some feats are granted automatically at reaching a given level of skill. Others must be bought separately with XP but have skill or feat requirements of their own, typically focused on the three level feat intervals. Some feats will need to be found in the world to be learned. I am aware I have essentially just re-invented feat trees, but the idea has a certain shine for me at the moment (especially as it would help banish some of the cracks forming in my current house rules). I think the main thing I like about this skill system is that it provides what I perceive to be the benefits of a skill system without the downsides. Skills allow the advancement system to be incremental, but each skill is used in a different way as the situation demands and qualitative abilities are still provided to the players.
There’s a reason skill systems are one of the cornerstones of modern RPG design. I just think that they need to be broken out of the constraints of the universal skill check in order to reach their full potential.
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